Slate article on video game addiction

Josh Levin's Slate.com article says that computer solitaire is our "secret shame," the "easy punch line, most often cited as the preferred hobby of the office slacker or the intellectual playground of dullards." But I've played it too, and in fairly large numbers. Levin pooh-poohs the "bogus" studies where it's claimed that we're losing 800 trillion dollars a year or some such, thanks to wasted time on Freecell, Minesweeper, and preloaded Windows games. He goes on to argue, too, that they might provide much-needed breaks from work that keeps the actually time we put into work more productive. Hmmm. In a perfect world, that seems fine. But computer addiction expert Dr. Maressa Hecht Orzack, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School who first opened a clinic for computer addiction in 1996, was hooked herself way back when. On what? Solitaire. "I kept playing solitaire more and more," she wrote in a 2006 Washington Post chat, "my late husband would find me asleep at the computer. I was missing deadlines. I knew something had to be done."

Sounds a lot like how people, myself included, get with MMOGs. I'm not sure if I feel better or worse that others seem as equally captivated by a low-tech computer game like Solitaire as I was with an immersive digital experience like WoW.

Not All Games Are Bad

Let's be clear--this website isn't a black-and-white statement that all video games are horrible things and should be avoided at all costs. Yahoo just put out an article detailing how parents can find "family time" with digitally-inclined kids by playing arcade-style, fun games. Having played my share share of Diego Rescue and Sesame Street Alphabet before, I can get on board with the idea that video games can serve as one vehicle to bring together parents and children. The difference, though, is that like Spaghetti Night or Sunday church or watching "Heroes" is that it's a schedule, special thing that might only occur once a week (okay, maybe two or three times, but the point is that it's not an ongoing, non-stop thing). If it remains special, it's about quality time, not quantity of play time. For an MMO player, it gets to be about quantity all too fast. And it almost never includes family members. Once you sign up for Teamspeak or Ventrilo and put on those noise-cancelling headphones, it's all over.

Wanting to Play

No, I'm not talking my own ongoing urges to plunge back into the World of Warcraft, but my friend's. My wingman and great friend, we ran dungeons together, started guilds together, ganked hordies together, and bad mouthed newbies in the trade channels together. We'd both been off WoW for nearly eight weeks and my life has been filled with moments where the fight-or-flight reflex in response to stress has been changed to a play-or-not crisis. It's an easy move to go from being furious over the endodontist charging me $200 too much which will take 4-6 weeks to correct, to playing WoW so I could stop thinking about it.

My pal was headed home after a long day from work (maybe 8 pm-ish), and the rain started thumping atop the hood of his car, his kids were at a sleepover, his wife had the sniffles and some back pain so she downed Advil and went to bed early, and he arrived home to find the house quiet. Ominously so. He fooled with TiVo a bit (God bless the men who invented TiVo), ate some Nutter Butter bars (God Bless those Nutter Butter bars too), drank a Pepsi (Okay, I don't like Pepsi, but I'd probably drink one if you bought it for me, unless of course Pepsi wanted to sponsor my blog, in which case I'd drink it by the case). Then he stared at the computer and knew it wouldn't take twenty minutes to download WoW back onto it and BAM he'd be up and running again. "It's so damn tempting," he told me, deciding that it'd be better to talk through the craving with me, someone who'd understand it, than sit there in the dark to battle this particular demon.

He didn't play. I still don't play. But like any other type of addiction, the impulse is there, lurking. And since digital culture is so much a part of our lives, it's hard to simply steer clear of the computer the way alcoholics can stay out of liquor sections in stores and avoid bars (not that those are that easy to do, either). Tell me your story, I'll tell you mine. I'm telling it in my memoir, UNPLUGGED, and I'm telling it here. I can't tell it enough times because it's real and scary and it's something too few people are talking about. Digital addiction. Video game addiction. Blog-obsessed folks. Email nutsos (here's a terrific article with frightening statics on email addiction from www.businesswire.com, which says things like 83% of people check email even while on vacation, and 26% admit to checking email on a laptop while in bed). You know the type, and it's more of something to razz someone about than worry over. I hope that'll change one day soon.

How Hard It Is to Quit

Think of trying to pull a bowling ball through a keyhole. Think of mowing a football field with hair clippers. Think of landing a Cessna with your eyes shut. . . on a bridge.

For me, that's how hard it was to stop playing The World of Warcraft. It was the first thing I did every morning. I played for an hour or so--to get "caught up" in the Auction House, the guild stuff, the trade channel--even before showering or taking my daily medicine and vitamins. Then I'd have a quick breakfast (i.e. shoving a few handfuls of Cheerios into my mouth and washing it down with a slug of milk straight from the jug) and was back at it again for an hour or two. Then a quick sandwich or hot dog for lunch, then more early afternoon WoW (a great time to handle certain quests since Azeroth tended to be fairly unpopulated during this time--nothing was worse than being 90% into an escort quest only to have some rogue throw blinding powder in your eyes and start 1-2 stabbing you until you went done). Then it'd be some evening WoW, which meant raiding, big-time dungeon massacres, heroic dungeons, and arena fighting. Somewhere in there, I'd squeak in an hour or two for "real" work, but I'd resent every second of it. And the entire time, I'd be mental WoW-ing my way through Kara, or re-speccing my resto druid, or thinking about a new alt and which professions he could have to best support my main.

There's a host of articles on video game addiction available, and I'll hit on most of them soon enough. Here, though, is a decent place to start. It's an interesting how-to wiki post on breaking an addiction to WoW. I'd particularly recommend (a) the WoW cheating idea to "burn out" your interest quickly, (b) assigning a per-hour dollar figure to your time and using a stopwatch to keep track of what each sessions costs you to play, and (c) deleting the game before you leave for a long vacation (the long vacation part is my idea--for me, breaking the CD and deleting the game then sitting around staring at the computer isn't enough--call me crazy, but I'd probably just buy the download again at the Blizzard site and be up and running in thirty minutes).

I'd love to hear from other people on how they managed to get away from WoW or are still struggling with it. If it's just a fun game for you and you can take it or leave it, terrific. But for the rest of us, it's more than that. Those are the folks I'm most interested in hearing from.